AI keeps arriving faster than most businesses can absorb it. A platform and partner ecosystem built to work together turns it into outcomes.
The budgets were approved. The pilots ran. The agents are live and doing their job. And yet, in most organizations, the business operates almost exactly as it did before. Leaders aren’t measuring success by how quickly a project launches. They’re measuring how quickly it creates value.
The challenge isn’t access. New models, agents, and interfaces arrive every week, and each one is another decision to make. Meanwhile, the value already inside the enterprise stays trapped between data, agents, workflows, and people.
Getting AI connected securely and with the right permissions is just the starting point. Real value comes when it works across the business, with the right context, no matter what new technology arrives or what customers already invested in. Getting there takes three things:
- An open platform where every layer works together.
- Technology partners who extend it.
- Consulting partners who orchestrate the business around it.
The foundation for the agentic enterprise
Leaders get more from AI when it works with the intelligence and governance they already trust, inside the workflows they already run. Salesforce brings together the complete foundation for the agentic enterprise in four connected layers of data, apps, agents, and interface, so humans and agents work together inside governed systems.
- Data 360 connects, federates, and harmonizes structured and unstructured data in place, so AI has trusted context.
- Customer 360 holds 27 years of business logic, workflows, and governed definitions. Agents work inside these workflows and inherit their governance.
- Agentforce is where a digital workforce is built, governed, and observed at scale, flexible enough to handle complexity and controlled enough to trust.
- AIforce brings all customer data, workflows, and security to any surface, in Claude, Slack, and Lightning, with the same permissions and audit trail, so people never leave their flow of work.
No single company can deliver every model, data source, and experience an enterprise needs. Through our strategic partnerships with Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, OpenAI, and other technology partners, customers can put their existing AI investments to work with Salesforce and keep the choice and flexibility to adapt as technology moves. The value of an ecosystem isn’t how many pieces it connects. It’s how well they work together toward a customer’s outcome.
Connected isn’t the same as transformed
Salesforce gives companies a platform that can deliver value from day one. Going further means changing how work gets done: the processes and roles around the technology. An agent can draft a reply in seconds, but if approvals still take three days, or no one owns the handoff between teams, the customer sees no difference. It’s a question of people and process as much as technology. Without that shift, AI gets bolted onto old processes, and the gains stay trapped in pilots instead of reaching the business.
Some customers take that step on their own. Others bring in consulting partners who have spent decades inside these processes. They know a workflow well enough to redesign it, not just automate it. They know where the risk really sits: not in the technology, but in process assumptions, data gaps, and organizational habits. And they have the credibility to tell a leadership team that a process needs to change.
That’s where the partners who already know the business come in.
Salesforce partners turn ecosystem expertise into business outcomes
For 27 years, our consulting partners have done more than implement Salesforce. They’ve helped customers connect the workflows, data models, and business logic inside Customer 360 into how businesses run, from enterprise resource planning and data platforms to daily operations. That is exactly the knowledge AI can build on, and these partners know where it lives.
Now they’re putting that knowledge to work for the AI era. Consulting partners advise on strategy and the tech stack, get the data foundation right, and tie every deployment to clear, measurable outcomes. That means helping leaders decide what to adopt, connecting data lakes through zero-copy access, and defining what the data means so agents act on trusted context. AI-native delivery tools such as MeshMesh help them build quickly, but partners know the customer’s workflows and data to decide what to build.
It also means redesigning workflows, governing solutions through monitoring and evaluation as new models and agents arrive, and getting the customer’s teams ready and bought in, so the change sticks. The result: The same intelligence powers the customer’s whole business, not just one application.
Here’s what that looks like in practice. A chief revenue officer wants more qualified pipeline. The first question isn’t which new agent to deploy. It’s “Where is conversion breaking down?” A partner works backward from that outcome. They fix the workflows, prepare the data, decide where new AI capabilities help, and embed them in the tools sellers already use. Then comes the question that matters: “Did conversion improve?” That’s the question that separates a live agent from a changed business.
Then comes the question that matters: “Did conversion improve?”
Proof, not promises
Answering that takes more than a good design. The real measure of a deployment isn’t going live. It’s how quickly you can show value and how fast you can build on it. That proof comes from inside the business, with the people doing the work.
That’s why we launched the Salesforce Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) Partner Network. This isn’t a plan or a pledge. Since launching in April this year, Salesforce has trained more than 1,300 partner FDEs across more than 110 partner practices globally, and they are working inside customer organizations today. Our partner FDEs sit side by side with customer teams, bringing hands-on Salesforce expertise together with AI-native delivery, and they stay in the workflow to help the team reach the results they want, faster. They bridge the gap between what the technology can do and how the business actually runs.
Customers working with our partner FDE firms see results faster, then build on them. According to Salesforce internal data, their agents go live 15 days sooner, and their teams are 60% more likely to keep using those agents, so early wins turn into lasting value across the business.
How leaders are becoming agentic enterprises
Getting value out of AI looks different in every industry, but the approach is the same: Start with the outcome, then build around it. Here’s how partners are helping customers in consumer goods, financial services, and retail:
At PepsiCo, PwC replaced fragmented contact centers with a modular, headless architecture without business disruption. Now PepsiCo is taking Agentforce to more than 100 contact centers and exploring about 20 more use cases, from personalized product recommendations to AI-generated planograms.
At BCU, NeuraFlash, part of Accenture, used their expertise in conversational agentic design to modernize the member service experience without compromising trust. With their virtual assistant, Freeda, successfully resolving 82% of inquiries, BCU is extending Agentforce into the product sales lifecycle with lead-nurturing agents, with plans to launch multiple new agents each quarter.
At Batteries Plus, Rosetree Solutions, now part of Citrin Cooperman, helped move Agentforce from concept to a live agent in under a month. The company has since deployed 10 agents, generated $21 million in pipeline, and sent more than 500,000 autonomous emails without adding headcount.
None of these companies treated go-live as the finish line. Each kept building on what worked, and that is what keeps the results growing. The customers and partners behind these results tell their full story on Ecosystem Unscripted.
Transformation doesn’t end at go-live
New models, agents, and interfaces will keep arriving. Customers need partners who can advise on what’s next, connect it to what already works, and keep building long after launch.
The leaders who keep pace won’t be the ones who pick the perfect stack today. They’ll be the ones who change the question from “What can this agent do?” to “What did it change for the business?”
Technology will keep moving. The advantage goes to the companies with the platform and partners to turn that movement into results for their business.
Note: This content was created by Salesforce.